The Blog

Announcing free LogBuddy advanced error reporting

When we announced CrashBuddy crash reporting in March, we were excited to help our clients have the best possible experience with user support, with full analysis and analytics into crashes that Apple’s reporter simply didn’t catch. CrashBuddy has helped us identify and diagnose dozens of otherwise-unreported crashes and has greatly improved the support experience for all and our clients’ projects.

Today we’re taking things even further. We’re announcing LogBuddy, a free technology that will begin shipping in all new projects today. What CrashBuddy does for crashes, LogBuddy does for other types of error conditions.

LogBuddy provides advanced, real-time reporting of non-crashing error conditions that are missed by our existing CrashBuddy technology because they don’t cause crashes. Every error or unexpected situation that a user encounters anywhere in the world is logged instantly, together with complete diagnostic information that let us reproduce, diagnose, and fix the error, and it all goes directly into our bug tracker.

But LogBuddy does much more than just log errors. Its advanced analysis and de-duplication algorithms analyze each incident and group related incidents together, meaning that most issues append to an existing report, rather than creating a new incident for each reproduction of the same underlying error.

We’ve been secretly rolling out LogBuddy in our beta builds, enterprise products, and production software to find and catch errors. So far, LogBuddy has identified over 300 distinct real-live error conditions in the wild that wouldn’t be traceable or reproducible via traditional means. To be clear, this number includes our off-site alpha and beta deployments, not just consumer-facing production software.

The death knell to any project is that elusive bug that the client can reproduce once in a blue moon–but never when the developer is watching. These are every software developer’s worst nightmare, as the time and complexity to track down these bugs can take a tremendously disproportionate amount of time and energy.

Actual LogBuddy screenshot

Fortunately, LogBuddy is always standing by to take a detailed error report, even for those issues that occur only once and can never be reproduced again. This lets us track down problems remotely that would be otherwise impossible to examine and diagnose. LogBuddy’s error reports contain a full stack trace of every function call on the stack, IP addresses, system configuration information, and even (optionally) a full debug log of every action taken since application start, as well as debugging information unique to a particular application. Since LogBuddy’s reports are instant, we can often find and fix issues faster than customers can report them.

LogBuddy is so powerful and saves us so much time that we’ve decided to provide the technology free of charge to all new projects, effective today, and many of our older projects have been grandfathered in. We’ve estimated that LogBuddy has saved us hundreds of developer hours in tracking down issues and has shaved months off project schedules.

LogBuddy lets us sort bugs by the number of times they've occurred, so we can fix the problems that affect the most people first.

LogBuddy is just the tip of the iceberg of our enormous investment into native iOS software development. We’ve got dozens of unannounced iOS libraries in production today, and many more in development. Learn more about how our extensive technology and depth of experience translates into accelerated development times and reduced risk for your project by getting in touch with us today.